How come LGBTQ activists are dancing in Italian streets in support of Hamas armed attack? What motivates Greta Thunberg to unilaterally express support for Gaza after the massacre against the Israeli civilian population on October 7th? Is it about some kind of community of values? Hardly. But what remains then?
In many ways, the support can appear very paradoxical. But really, it is just as expected that large parts of the left in Europe during the 20th century united with political movements that advocated armed revolution and rejected parliamentary democracy. While large parts of the world suffered under communist oppression, protesters in the West mobilized primarily against the United States and its allies - rarely if ever against the Soviet Union and its cronies.
As long as the enemy was associated with imperialism, capitalism or colonialism, there has been, within the Western left, an almost limitless patience with movements - nationalist, revolutionary and now radical Islamist - which fought "US imperialism", according to the motto my enemy's enemy is mine Friend.
Therefore, the reactions - both the active support for armed struggle against Israel and the silence in the face of the fact that Hamas started the war currently taking place in Gaza - follow a familiar script. It is staged every time Israel needs to defend itself against attacks by Hamas.
Israel is unanimously condemned and its defense can never be considered legitimate. The country's existence is once again declared to be incurably colonial and the Palestinians and their allies cannot, by definition, do wrong as their actions are always part of a necessary resistance and freedom struggle.
This strange alliance is no coincidence but has an ancient history. The answer to why the Western left ended up here must be traced back to the 20th century and the foreign policy reversal that the Soviet Union made seventy years ago.
The Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948. Temporarily, Moscow's otherwise harsh criticism of Zionism, which was otherwise considered by Stalin to be a dangerous Jewish bourgeois nationalism, ceased. Military support for Israel was given, among others, from communist Czechoslovakia, which was crucial for the new country to survive the onslaught from neighboring Arab states that followed shortly after Israel declared its independence.
But then the attitude changed. During the early 1950s it became clear to the Soviet Union that Israel would never be a socialist ally in the Middle East. Instead, it was realized that there was much more to be gained by allying with Israel's Arab neighbors. This became particularly evident after the Suez Crisis of 1956 when the British and French failed to prevent the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal.
For the Eastern Bloc and the European Communists, Israel went from being the socialist promise to becoming an expression of American and British imperialism and colonialism. For the Communists, Zionism, unlike any form of Arab nationalism, became synonymous with Western-controlled imperialism. Therefore, they also actively turned a blind eye to the oppression Jews were subjected to in the Arab countries.
The left during this time devoted no demonstrations to protest the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Muslim countries. Countries like Iraq, Algeria, and Egypt that had Jewish populations longer than Islam existed as a religion persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured their Jewish residents. It is about almost a million people who were forced to leave their homes and possessions.
These people are erased from the solidarity consciousness of the left with the same precision with which the Muslim states carried out their cleansing. The simple reason is that such consideration, a kind of complicating circumstance, did not fit into Soviet foreign policy.
For the Soviets, the support to the Arab states was not really about any strong principles, it was crass realpolitik - while for the Arab states it was only about getting Israel away. Here was a nascent Arab nationalism combined with socialist elements whose great enemies were the former colonial powers, Great Britain and France. A strategic golden location for the Soviet Union.
That is why the Soviets also did everything to ensure that their new allies in the 1960s, Syria and Egypt, would attack and destroy Israel. In his memoirs, the then Soviet General Secretary and notorious anti-Semite, Nikita Khrushchev, described how the Kremlin urged the Egyptians to attack Israel. The Kremlin was fully aware that such an attack risked the complete annihilation of Israel as a state.
But Israel prevented the attack and defeated the Arab states in 1967. The defeat also meant that Gaza and the West Bank, which until then had been parts of Egypt and Jordan respectively, were occupied by Israel. But the Soviet and Arab description of Israel was set in stone.
It must be said that it was a very successful propaganda victory for the Soviet Union that its own occupation of large parts of Europe and Central Asia was accepted by the European left, while successfully portraying Israel as the unsolved colonial problem of its time.
It is actually this double bookkeeping with principles that lives on in our time. Israel is still, in the same way as was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, the imperialist power, while, for example, the Arab states' imperial ambitions and nationalism are not sorted under the category of reprehensible phenomena.
But unlike what the left in Western Europe was led to believe, this anti-imperialist mobilization did not take place out of consideration for the Palestinian Arabs. Between the years 1948 and 1967, no attempts were made by Egypt (which then controlled the Gaza Strip) or Jordan (which ruled over the West Bank) to create a Palestinian state in these territories.
They had the chance to create a Palestinian state and many opportunities would come after that. But to understand why this does not happen, one must realize that the real purpose of the Soviet Union and the Arab states was not primarily a state for the Palestinians, but that Israel, the ally of the United States and the West, would be wiped off the map.
Only when the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, was the possibility of a compromise solution seriously opened up. The Oslo Accords were based on a two-state solution but fell because the parties could not agree on how Jerusalem should be administered and that Yassir Arafat, the leader of the PLO, insisted that all Palestinians - who had lived in refugee camps since 1948 and 1967 - should be allowed to return.
The Soviet Union may have fallen, but the Soviet-backed idea of Israel as an impossible imperialist actor did not. While the old Palestinian left-wing movement that Arafat led waned, its language, and that of the Soviets, was inherited by the increasingly strong Islamist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The left in the West took no notice of who took over the old Soviet rhetoric, but stuck by old habit.
This partly explains why Hamas can confidently reject any possibility of compromise with Israel. They need not fear that their aggression against Israel will be seen by the promoters of the Palestinian cause in the West. Even Israel's withdrawal from Gaza (2007) was rewarded with nothing but further terror attacks. Hamas has only one goal in mind: That Israel in its current form ceases to exist.
The European left has never come to terms with the fact that it made itself a branch of Soviet foreign policy as well as the Arab dictatorships' goal of annihilating Israel. Likewise, knowledge of the Arab states' long-term disinterest in creating a Palestinian state or reluctance to integrate the Palestinian refugees has been suppressed.
The simple reason is that it never fit into the description set by the Soviet Union together with the Arab states: That it is Israel who is the imperialist in the context, the Arabs are only fighting for their liberation and everything Israel does, as long as the country does not cease to exist on its own, is wrong.
Sign up for Adam's newsletter
Why do we talk about what we talk about? GP's Adam Cwejman covers the world and shares what got him thinking.
To sign up for the newsletter, you need a digital account, which is free of charge and gives you several advantages. Follow the instructions and sign up for the newsletter here.
Adam Cwejman is political editor at GP. He writes about both the local and the global - everything from Gothenburg's urban planning to the major political changes of our time.
Comments
Comment on the article
What do you think? Below, you can comment on the article via the Question service. Note that you need to create an account and log in first. Remember to keep a good tone and not to change the subject. Show respect for other writers and people involved in the article. Posts deemed inappropriate will be removed and GP reserves the right to use comments in editorial content.